DDB Worldwide

Based on Wikipedia: DDB Worldwide

In 1959, a small advertising agency did something unthinkable. They took out a full-page ad featuring a tiny Volkswagen Beetle surrounded by vast empty white space. The headline read simply: "Think Small."

This was madness. American car ads screamed about size, power, chrome, and tail fins. They showed gleaming behemoths parked in front of mansions. Nobody sold smallness. Nobody left that much expensive white space unused. And nobody admitted their product was, well, modest.

The campaign became the most celebrated advertisement of the twentieth century.

Three Men Walk Into Advertising

The agency behind that Volkswagen revolution was Doyle Dane Bernbach, and its founding story reads like a fable about creative misfits. Bill Bernbach worked as Creative Director at Grey Advertising in New York, where he'd grown frustrated with the industry's relentless hammering of consumers with repetitive, shouty messages. Ned Doyle was his colleague there, sharing his discontent with advertising's tired formulas.

In 1949, they left to join forces with Mac Dane, who was running what could generously be called a tiny agency. Together in Manhattan, they divided the work according to their strengths. Dane handled the unglamorous but essential business of administration and promotion. Doyle focused on keeping clients happy. And Bernbach did something revolutionary: he actually cared about making the advertisements good.

Their first client was Ohrbach's, a discount department store. The ads they created were unlike anything the industry had seen. Instead of screaming about prices and pounding the message home through repetition, they used wit. They deployed catchy slogans. They trusted consumers to be intelligent enough to get a joke.

This approach had a name: soft sell. It stood in direct contrast to the hard sell that had dominated advertising since its inception—the philosophy that consumers needed to be bludgeoned with a message until they submitted and bought something.

The Beetle That Changed Everything

The agency won small accounts from clients who couldn't afford the big agencies and their big ideas. But everything changed when Volkswagen came calling.

Consider the challenge. It was the 1950s. American prosperity meant big houses, big families, and very big cars. Volkswagen wanted to sell Americans a car designed in Nazi Germany, nicknamed after an insect, and barely large enough to fit a family's groceries.

Any rational agency would have tried to make the Beetle seem bigger, more American, more powerful. Doyle Dane Bernbach did the opposite. They leaned into every supposed weakness.

"Think Small" acknowledged what everyone could see: the car was tiny. But the ad reframed that smallness as a virtue. Less gas. Easier parking. Lower insurance. The honesty was disarming. Here was an advertiser admitting reality instead of constructing fantasy.

Another famous ad in the campaign showed a Beetle with the single word "Lemon" beneath it. The copy explained that this particular car had been rejected by Volkswagen's quality inspectors because of a minor blemish on the chrome strip of the glove compartment. The message was clear: Volkswagen's standards were so exacting that this perfectly functional car hadn't made the cut. What looked like self-deprecation was actually a boast.

When Advertising Age compiled its list of the twentieth century's greatest campaigns in 1999, "Think Small" took the top spot. Not second. Not in the top ten. Number one, full stop.

The Art of Coming in Second

In 1960, Doyle Dane Bernbach won the Avis account. Avis rented cars, just like Hertz. The problem was that Hertz was number one, and everyone knew it.

Again, the conventional approach would have been to claim superiority, or at least equality. Instead, the agency created one of advertising's most memorable admissions of inferiority: "We're Number Two. We Try Harder."

The logic was beautifully inverted. Because Avis wasn't the biggest, they couldn't afford to be complacent. They had to work harder for your business. The rental car would be cleaner, the service would be friendlier, because Avis needed your approval in a way that market-leading Hertz did not.

The slogan still echoes in Avis marketing today, more than sixty years later. "We Try Harder" became so embedded in the company's identity that abandoning it would mean abandoning a piece of their corporate soul.

The Ad That Helped Win an Election

In 1964, Doyle Dane Bernbach waded into politics with consequences that would reshape campaign advertising forever.

Lyndon Johnson faced Barry Goldwater in the presidential election. Goldwater had made statements suggesting he might be willing to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, and his opponents wanted to make voters afraid of what his finger on the button might mean.

The result was the "Daisy" commercial. A little girl stands in a field, plucking petals from a daisy and counting. Her innocent voice gives way to a military countdown. The camera zooms into her eye, and then—a nuclear explosion fills the screen. Johnson's voice intones: "These are the stakes."

The ad aired exactly once during a paid broadcast. But the controversy it generated meant it was replayed on news programs across the country, achieving reach no advertising budget could have purchased. Political advertising would never be the same. The era of attack ads and emotional manipulation had begun.

There was a personal consequence for the agency. Mac Dane, one of the three founders, found his name added to Nixon's infamous Enemies List. Being despised by a future president who would resign in disgrace was, in certain circles, a badge of honor.

Juan Valdez and the Coffee That Had a Face

A year before the Avis campaign, in 1959, the agency tackled another branding challenge. The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia wanted Americans to think specifically about Colombian coffee, not just generic coffee from wherever.

Doyle Dane Bernbach created Juan Valdez, a fictional coffee farmer with his trusty mule, traversing the Colombian mountains to bring consumers the finest beans. Juan Valdez became one of advertising's most enduring mascots, appearing in commercials for decades and even inspiring his own chain of coffee shops.

The genius lay in personification. Coffee is a commodity, essentially identical from one bag to the next. But Colombian coffee now had a human story, a face, a narrative of careful cultivation in misty mountain highlands. It wasn't just coffee. It was Juan's coffee.

Mikey Likes It

In 1972, the agency created a commercial for Life cereal that would run continuously for twelve years—an almost unheard-of lifespan for a television advertisement.

The premise was simple. Two brothers don't want to try the new cereal, suspicious that anything healthy must taste terrible. They push the bowl toward their younger brother Mikey, notorious for disliking everything. Mikey digs in enthusiastically. "He likes it! Hey Mikey!"

The commercial resonated because it captured a truth about childhood and family dynamics that every viewer recognized. The youngest sibling as guinea pig. The surprise when the picky eater approves. The product demonstrated its appeal without anyone having to claim it directly.

Growing Pains and Global Ambitions

Success brought expansion. A Los Angeles office opened in 1954. In 1961, the agency opened its first international outpost in West Germany—naturally, to service the Volkswagen account that had made them famous. London followed, then other European capitals.

By 1968, Bill Bernbach had become chairman and chief executive officer as the agency went public. He stepped back to chairman of the executive committee in 1976, as the agency he'd founded evolved beyond what any single creative vision could contain.

The growth wasn't always smooth. A book titled "Nobody's Perfect: Bill Bernbach and the Golden Age of Advertising" chronicled both the creative triumphs and the management crises that plagued the agency. Written by Doris Willens, who served as the agency's Director of Public Relations for eighteen years, it drew on oral histories with all three founders and the succession of presidents who tried to manage the creative beast Bernbach had built.

When Bernbach died in 1982, something essential departed with him. Earnings collapsed to just $1.7 million. Key talent fled. Major clients followed them out the door.

The Chicago Connection

The story of DDB—as the agency would eventually become known—cannot be told without understanding Needham Harper, the Chicago firm that would become its merger partner.

Needham started in 1925 as the Maurice H. Needham Company with two clients and total billings of $270,000. By 1934, renamed Needham, Louis and Brorby, they'd won the Kraft Foods account and opened a Hollywood office. The Hollywood connection was practical: clients wanted their radio programs produced where the talent was.

In 1951, Needham recognized that television would revolutionize advertising and opened a New York office specifically to stake their claim in the new medium. The Chicago operation kept growing with clients like Morton Salt, Household Finance Corporation, General Mills, and Frigidaire.

But Needham's most enduring contribution to advertising culture came from a psychologist named Ernest Dichter and a copywriter named Sandy Sulcer. They were working on the account for a gasoline company then called Oklahoma, later Esso, eventually ExxonMobil. Research indicated that American drivers wanted both power and playfulness from their cars. Sulcer and Dichter chose the tiger to embody that desire.

"Put a Tiger in Your Tank" became one of advertising's most memorable taglines. The campaign ran for decades, and ExxonMobil's tiger mascot remains in use today—proof that a good idea, grounded in genuine insight about consumer psychology, can outlive generations of executives.

The Big Bang

By the mid-1980s, the advertising industry was consolidating rapidly. The era of hostile takeovers had reached Madison Avenue, and independent agencies felt vulnerable. The solution was to grow through merger before someone grew by acquiring you.

In 1986, something unprecedented happened. Three major agencies—Doyle Dane Bernbach, Needham Harper, and BBDO—merged their ownership stakes to form a new holding company called Omnicom Group. It instantly became the world's largest advertising conglomerate.

Industry observers called it the "Big Bang" merger. It was a defensive move, a response to competitive threats from other consolidating giants. But it was also a recognition that the advertising business had changed. Individual creative boutiques couldn't compete for global accounts against networks that spanned continents.

The operating agencies of Doyle Dane Bernbach and Needham Harper merged to become DDB Needham, with Keith L. Reinhard—formerly of Needham—as president and chief executive. Reinhard made it his mission to revive Bernbach's creative philosophy, digging into the founder's writings and reorienting the agency toward what he called "relevancy, originality, and impact."

The turnaround was swift. By 1987, the merged firm had earnings of $358.5 million on $2.6 billion in billings. Bernbach's ghost was appeased.

Tragedy on the River

In 1987, DDB Needham suffered a devastating loss that Hollywood would later dramatize. Al Wolfe, the United States president of the agency, had organized a whitewater rafting expedition along the Chilko River in British Columbia. Several executives died in the rapids.

The film "White Mile" drew loosely on the tragedy, exploring themes of corporate machismo and risk-taking culture. For the agency, it was a reminder that behind the clever slogans and witty campaigns were human beings with families who mourned them.

Reinvention and Rebranding

The agency continued to evolve through the 1990s. In 1989, DDB Needham led all United States agencies in newspaper media billings. In 1990, they took the radical step of guaranteeing advertising results—tying their compensation to whether clients actually met their sales goals. The industry was skeptical, but it signaled a new era of accountability.

By 1999, fifty years after Bernbach, Doyle, and Dane had started their Manhattan boutique, the agency dropped "Needham" from its name entirely. It would be known simply as DDB Worldwide, a name that acknowledged both its heritage and its global ambitions.

That same year, DDB Worldwide was named Advertising Age's first-ever "Global Network of the Year." The recognition validated half a century of creative philosophy that Bernbach had pioneered: treat consumers as intelligent adults, use wit rather than volume, and never underestimate the power of a good idea simply expressed.

A Different Kind of Hiring

From its earliest days, Doyle Dane Bernbach practiced something unusual in the often homogeneous world of 1950s corporate America. They hired people who looked different, thought different, came from different backgrounds.

Among their initial team of thirteen employees was Phyllis Robinson, who became the first female chief copywriter in American advertising history. This wasn't charity or political correctness—concepts that barely existed in the 1950s. It was a competitive strategy. The agency called it "no duplicates": seeking professional, socioeconomic, and cultural diversity specifically because different perspectives produced more creative solutions.

People who found themselves unwelcome at other agencies—too ethnic, too female, too unconventional—discovered that Doyle Dane Bernbach valued precisely what made them outsiders. The advertising they created was different because the people creating it were different.

The Global Patchwork

DDB's international story is one of acquisitions, mergers, and occasional identity crises. In London, the 1986 merger combined two competing offices—one from Doyle Dane Bernbach, one from Needham. Reinhard made six trips to sort out the mess, ultimately firing most of the Needham managers and installing DDB leadership.

By 1989, the London operation was struggling. Omnicom acquired a British agency called Boase Massimi Pollitt, merged it with DDB, and renamed the result BMP DDB. It would operate under that name until 2004, when a network-wide rebranding made it simply DDB London. The agency weathered management crises, account losses, and years of decline before merging with a rising independent called Adam & Eve in 2012. The combined Adam & Eve DDB became one of London's most celebrated agencies.

In Australia, the story traces back to 1945, when ex-servicemen returning from World War II founded United Services Publicity in Melbourne. The founders had worked at an agency called Samson Clark Price-Berry that closed during the war. Through decades of mergers and acquisitions, the agency connected with Needham in 1967, became part of the Omnicom constellation in 1986, and eventually rebranded as DDB Australia. In 2019, the Australian operation went back to using Doyle Dane Bernbach—reclaiming the heritage that the abbreviated DDB had obscured.

Sweden hosts DDB Stockholm, one of that country's largest agencies, working with blue-chip clients like the Swedish Armed Forces, McDonald's, and Volkswagen. In the Philippines, the network traces to 1958, when Antonio de Joya founded Advertising Marketing Associates. It became DDB Group Philippines in 1993, growing to three hundred employees across five cities—though a 2023 scandal involving non-original stock footage in a tourism campaign forced a public apology and contract termination by the Department of Tourism.

The Clients Who Stayed

In advertising, client relationships are notoriously volatile. Creative disagreements, personnel changes, mergers, and market shifts constantly reshuffle which agencies serve which brands. Against this backdrop, some of DDB's client relationships stand out for their remarkable durability.

Volkswagen, the account that made Doyle Dane Bernbach famous in 1959, remained with the network for decades across multiple countries. McDonald's started working with Needham in the 1960s and continued with DDB after the merger. ExxonMobil—the company whose tiger still prowls gas station signs—has been a client since the 1960s as well. Unilever and Johnson & Johnson maintained broad global relationships well into the 2020s.

These decades-long partnerships suggest something beyond mere contract renewals. They indicate trust built over generations of executives, through economic booms and busts, through complete transformations of media and consumer behavior. When a relationship survives that much change, it speaks to something durable in how the agency approaches its work.

The Final Chapter

On December 1, 2025, DDB ceased to exist as a brand. Omnicom absorbed it into TBWA, another network in its portfolio. The name that Bill Bernbach had built, that had revolutionized advertising, that had created "Think Small" and "We Try Harder" and the Daisy ad and Juan Valdez—that name was retired after seventy-six years.

Perhaps it was inevitable. The advertising industry that Doyle Dane Bernbach had helped create no longer existed in recognizable form. Television, the medium that had made mass advertising possible, had fragmented into streaming services and social media feeds. The clever print ad, the memorable thirty-second spot—these formats that DDB had mastered were giving way to influencer marketing and algorithmic targeting.

But the ideas endure. The belief that consumers are intelligent and can handle honesty. The insight that admitting weakness can be a form of strength. The understanding that wit and charm persuade more effectively than repetition and volume. These principles, radical when Bernbach articulated them in 1949, have become the common wisdom of marketing.

Every time an advertiser chooses candor over hype, acknowledges a product's limitations to build trust, or respects the audience enough to make them think—somewhere, Bill Bernbach's ghost is smiling. The agency may be gone, but the revolution it started continues.